Localization and Tracking of an Indoor Autonomous Vehicle Based on the Phase Difference of Passive UHF RFID Signals

State-of-the-art radio frequency identification (RFID)-based indoor autonomous vehicles localization methods are mostly based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements. However, the accuracy of these methods is not high enough for real-world scenarios. To overcome this problem, a novel dual-frequency phase difference of arrival (PDOA) ranging-based indoor autonomous vehicle localization and tracking scheme was developed. Firstly, the method gets the distance between the RFID reader and the tag by dual-frequency PDOA ranging. Then, a maximum likelihood estimation and semi-definite programming (SDP)-based localization algorithm is utilized to calculate the position of the autonomous vehicles, which can mitigate the multipath ranging error and obtain a more accurate positioning result. Finally, vehicle traveling information and the position achieved by RFID localization are fused with a Kalman filter (KF). The proposed method can work in a low-density tag deployment environment. Simulation experiment results showed that the proposed vehicle localization and tracking method achieves centimeter-level mean tracking accuracy.